:o)
Twittering…
so I’ve joined Twitter. You may remember I joined it’s main rival Jaiku a while ago, and you may also have seen the Jaiku widgets on the blog and on my site front page… Sadly, Jaiku just didn’t have the user-base that Twitter has (they probably even had to take Murray’s advice from flight of the Conchords and ‘put -base on the end, makes it look like there’s more of them’) and I was basically just posting one line updates to my website front page. I did get quite a few clicks through the blog from it, and may still find a way to use Jaiku just for posting weblinks or something (something I also do via the del.icio.us feed I’ve got embedded at the bottom of my links page.)
So when Jeff Schmidt (who was the person that told me about Jaiku in the first place) jumped from Jaiku to Twitter, it seemed common sense to admit that Jaiku wasn’t about suddenly become de rigueur.
So I’m twittering here – if you’re on Twitter, you can ‘follow’ me, and perhaps I’ll follow you. It’s quite fun the way you can comment on people’s twitterings, but just including their name with an @ in front in your response…
…yes, you’re right, I really do need to get out more.
futuremusictalk.com launched…
A couple of months back, Sarda came up with the idea of an aggregated blog bringing together lots of the different thinkers writing about the future of the music industry. My ‘future of music’ posts are up there alongside fab thinkers and writers like Gerd Leonhard and Andrew Dubber.
…which I guess means I ought to get back to writing about the future of music! Despite not blogging about it as much of late, I’ve been doing lots of thinking about it, from a lot of different angles. Today’s fairly throw-away thought was just that ‘experience is not downloadable’ – I was walking through Time’s Square in NYC, and wondering how the big theatrical shows can afford to keep running at the level they do, here and in London. And part of it is that they offer an experience that can’t be downloaded – ACTUALLY going to the show is central to any kind of engagement with it. You could download the soundtrack, even a live video of the show, look at pics online, download and print out the sheet music, but none of that is going to mean much if you haven’t experienced it.
I’ll have to have a look and see if there are stats anywhere on how much of the income from shows is in the merchandising and licensing aspects, over and above ticket sales…
Here’s another related though slightly tangental thought – I have a friend who used to manage a cinema in London. He said that ALL the money they made was over the concession stand. The actually films were roughly a break-even venture, when the running of the place was taken into consideration, the cost of the films, against the ticket price. The real money was in selling a bucket of Coke big enough to drown Vern Troyer in – made from syrup that cost 4p – for £2.50, and a pig’s trough-sized pail of popcorn for £4, when their total outlay for the stuff was about 2% of that…
Anyway, the point is, that’s the way the entertainment industry funds itself – merchandising, adverts, providing overpriced McSwill to the McHogs that turn up to watch and gorge…
One of the big questions, and the hardest part of this whole thing is still – what do you do as a musician if you don’t want to make the majority of your money in advertising or running a snack bar at your gigs?
If you gig, it has to be an event. This new focus on musicians trying to monetize gigging again could actually be a really good thing – fewer doleful perfunctory performances, fewer tours where every night is identical. For those of us doing the indie thing, we need to be creative in making our gigs a proper night out – house concerts are great for this. A house concert has the potential to be a really special event. Lo. and I have done a number of them over the last year where the hosts have told us that months later people still ask them every time they see them when they are next going to have us back. I’m guessing that hasn’t been happening quite so much at the clubs we’ve played at (though you never know, we are rather good. ;o)
That said, I’m still loathe to let go of the wonder of recorded music, resigning it to being a give-away to entice people to shows or to get clicks on google ads, even though increasingly it seems that’s the way we’re being lead…
This became a reality for me a couple of days ago when I signed up for the new Last.fm venture to give free music to their subscribers and pay the artists in ad-sharing – it’s the first time I’m accepted an advertising revenue sharing deal… Why? Cos I’m making money for them via ads whether I take it or not. I either have my share, or they do, or I remove my music. That doesn’t seem like a smart thing to do with a site as cool as last.fm, so I’m in. But it does feel a bit weird. I guess I can console myself with the thought that unless you lovely readers all head over there and listen to loads of my streamed from their site I’m going to be making about 10c a year…
One last thing for now – for us indies, Cds aren’t going anywhere while we’re still playin live shows. People want to buy music, take a piece of it home – like the fluffy indonesian Simba that the peeps here in NYC pick up for $15 after seeing the Lion King, folks want to get some discs to listen to in the car on the way home. I wonder what the first technology that allows for the easy buying of downloads at gigs will be? a USB still is just a posh CD – what about actual transfer to iPod/phone/whatever?
In other news, I just extended my stay in NYC due to me feeling a bit too ill to fly back to London tomorrow, so I’ll be back early next week…
(Oh, Jeff Schmidt, you need to email James at futuremusictalk and get your blog on the list…)
Microformats plug-in for Safari
A few days ago Sarda sent me a link to this microformats plug-in for Safari. Basically what it does is, when there’s an microformat data on a page, it shows the lil’ green microformat symbol in the address bar (like where the orange RSS thingie is if you’re looking at this page in Safari), and when you click on it, you get the option to automatically add the hCalendar or hCard address info to iCal or your address book.
It’s very useful for adding gig details from last.fm direct into iCal, or for adding the gig dates from my gig dates page direct into iCal. Or even the gig dates posted on this ‘ere blog. If you had the plug-in installed, and are reading this on the home page of the blog, then the two previous gig date entries would be listed in the microformat thingie, and you could add them with one click.
There’s a similar plug-in for Firefox, should that be your thing.
And if you’re using MS Explorer, please switch to something else – Firefox, Opera, or even Safari for PC…
Facebook for musicians – a jumbled mess?
One of the massive challenges facing the world of social networking and how it interfaces with marketing (in our case, marketing music) is the area of integration – simply put, how can information uploaded be spread across MySpace, Facebook, Last.fm etc. without us needing to add everything to all of them individually… How can the data from one site be output to be processed by another… The formats and web-standards are there for it to work in the form of RSS/XML, Microformat mark-up and feeds, but very few sites will ACCEPT information that way. Some output it – Reverb Nation generate RSS feeds of gig dates for artists, and last.fm generates ical feeds of the gigs you’ve added to your profile etc. but neither of them will accept input from an hcal formatted page…
Anyway, all of that stuff is lightyears away for the increasingly lumbering behemoth that is Facebook because they cant even get integration to work within their own f-ing site!!!
“What’s the problem?”, you ask, perfectly reasonably. Well, at the moment, there are number of tools for musicians on facebook, their ‘flagship’ idea being Pages – that is, public pages that you can create for a band, product, service, whatever. You create your band page, then folks add themselves as ‘fans’.
However, they also have an excellent app. for ordinary facebook profiles called ‘My Band’ – created by the lovelies at Reverb Nation, it puts your reverb nation player onto your facebook profile (note, not your ‘page’), and even has a separate page for each artist within facebook, and allows your friends to sign up as ‘a fan’. Can you see a huge crossover in purpose here? Of course.
“Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way of connecting the two?” Yes it would, good question, well done.
“Well, is there?” It would appear not.
And to make matters worse, there’s also no link between your Reverb Nation My Band app. fans on facebook and your fans that are actually on your Reverb Nation page.
So what needs to happen? Well, it would be great if Facebook did a proper hook up with Reverb Nation and started to allow embedding the ‘My Band’ player into the page – they could make it the heart of the page in the way that the myspace player is the thing that made that site work so well. That may well entail Facebook buying Reverb Nation – I’m not sure that the corporate side of the Facebook machine would be all that happy about that close a hook-up with a partner rather than a subsidiary – but either way, it’d make it work much better, and would definitely be a giant leap towards Facebook’s aim of finishing off MySpace… It would then mean that there would be proper integration between the embedded Reverb Nation widgets that litter all kinds of pages, and the Reverb Nation Facebook plug-in for fans.
For now though, here are the resources you need to get started, and have the stuff in place when it all starts. These are also the links to follow if you want to check out my music on facebook, and become a fan (which you’ll have to do at least three times for blanket coverage! :o) – you’ll need to log-in to Facebook to access any of the pages there…
My ReverbNation.com page
My Facebook artist ‘Page’
The reverbnation listener plugin for Facebook – for anyone else wanting to add my music to their page, to help spread the word.
If you’re on Facebook, please do add yourself as a fan.
Statistics relating to the website redesign…
Just a quick observation on the redesign of my main website – whil the number of visitors to the site is pretty much the same now as it was before the redesign, those visitors are sticking around for longer and looking at more pages than before… That’s good news! :o)
As for the blog, a heck of a lot of the traffic to my blog now comes from the front page of stevelawson.net, though the number of visitors is in general lower than it was a couple of years ago… maybe people preferred it when I was blogging about cats and european elections. :o)
Stats break over – back to whatever it was you were doing before…
This laptop is dead. It's a gonna. etc.
just managed to get a few minutes of life out of my laptop… it takes about an hour of trying to get it to start, and then it stays working for a few minutes… so my postings may be sporadic over the next couple of days, same goes for email responses… new lappy arrives in about two weeks, and once i’m home i’ll be using the desktop, but for the next few days, my webtime may be limited to checking email and IM on my phone…
Will try to keep the jaiku blog up to date via texts…
Another nice lil' feature for keeping up with gig news…
after consulting with lovely Drew earlier via mobile AIM, whilst on the bus, I found a way to add individual calendar adding links to my gig listings page on my site – so if you’re looking there and see a gig you want to go to, and you use iCal or google calendar or outlook or loads of other calendar apps, you can just click on the link next to that entry, and it’ll add it to your calendar, thanks to the wonders of the hCalendar microformat.
All future gigs added to the blog will have it in there as well. Hurrah for me!
Been a few interesting new news features and articles posted on the whole future of music/Media 2.0/download licensing front, but I’ve had no time to get my thoughts down about them, and probably won’t for a couple of days, as I’m in Salford tomorrow for a masterclass, then Perth in Scotland, then a house concert in Fife, then seeing my mum in Berwick, then back to London on sunday… But then, you knew that cos you’ve all got the calendar feed anyway. ;o)
Gig dates RSS feed development…
As you’ll have seen yesterday, I’ve started posting my upcoming gig dates as entries on the blog – this puts them on the front page of the website, means that you get to read about them here, and also it means I can generate a separate gigs RSS feed direct from here, that contains all the microformat data (the bit that means it’ll add to a calendar apps).
….except it doesn’t… because the tag-specific pages here (here’s the one for stuff tagged as gig dates) strip out all the formatting, so you don’t get the weblinks, you don’t get the hcal mark-up, and you don’t even get the line-breaks that stop it from just looking like a jumble of text.
So, for now, it’s back to the iChat drawing board with the lovely Sarda to see if he knows how to make it work the way I want it to work. :o)
The eventual idea is that this will be the feed that is directly linked from my gig calendar page on my site, and it’ll contain the hcal information so that clever readers can extract the information and you’ll be able to add individual gigs to your calendar if you want to go to them and need a reminder.
stevelawson.net – providing for all your bassgeek needs since 1997… :o)
leopard. O. M. G…
have you seen the Apple OS X Leopard guided tour? – this is SOOO cool. My laptop is falling apart, I need a new one. I can’t afford a new one at the moment, but as soon as I can, I’m getting a new Mac, with Leopard. The coolest feature set I’ve ever seen. Really. Outstanding.
*speechless*